I’ve written a review of this exhibition for Australian Historical Studies.

It discusses exhibition installation, the archive, and Ellis’s technique. Here’s the first paragraph:

“I have to confess, I used to be snooty about Rennie Ellis (1940-2003). When I was a postmodern cadet at art school and being taught to deconstruct the photographic gaze, I condemned the cheap souvenir books he was producing then — such as Life’s a Beach (1983) and Life’s a Parade (1986) — for pandering to the viewer’s pervy propensities. How wrong can you be. He is one of Australia’s greatest photographers and was, as the photography historian Gael Newton comments within this exhibition, years ahead of us art school types when it came to autoethnography.”